Errors of fact, design, and interpretation abound in the medical
literature on guns and violence. The peer review process has failed
to prevent publication of the errors of politicized, results-oriented
research. Most of the data on guns and violence are available in the
criminological, legal, and social sciences literature, yet escapes
acknowledgment or analysis of the medical literature. Lobbyists and
other partisans continue to promulgate the fallacies that cloud the
public debate and impede the development of effective strategies to
reduce violence in our society. This article examines a
representative sample of politicized and incompetent research.

Publication note:

"Guns in the Medical Literature: A Failure of Peer Review"
appeared in the March 1994
Journal Of The Medical Association Of Georgia, 83(13).
The version presented here is from a January 1994 draft
and contains some material that did not appear in JMAG.

Graphs 1-5, 10-13 and 16-18 were scanned by John Grossbohlin
(john.grossbohlin@hvbbs.com) from the JMAG version.
Note that the legend in graph 3 has been corrected in the scan:
the labels for the two curves were reversed in the printed version.
Graphs 6-9, 14 and 15 were scanned (using fax) from the
January version by Jeff Chan, who also restored the title in Graph 16.
Graphs are numbered differently in JMAG.